Senkichiro Nasaka

WORK

1958
mixed media on paper
14 3/8 x 19 3/4 inches

Senkichiro Nasaka was born in Osaka in 1923 and studied painting at the Nakanoshima Western-Style Painting Institute and the Kawabata Painting School in Tokyo before graduating from the Department of Japanese Painting, Kyoto City University in 1952, where he was a contemporary of Kazuo Shiraga. His work from the late 1950s and early 1960s is characterized by gestural flowing drips of paint, built-up surfaces, and densely-layered daubs and lines, seen in this wonderful painting on paper from 1958. Nasaka exhibited in the 15th Gutai Exhibition in 1965 and became a member that year, during its second phase, as the artists in the group incorporated new technologies and assessed Japan’s rapid economic growth and world presence. For Expo ’70, Nasaka designed the Gutai group exhibition for the Midori Pavilion, in part by extending a winding metal tube through the hall on which Gutai works hung and from which visitors could hear musique concrete. Nasaka’s design was recreated in the Guggenheim exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground earlier this year. Nasaka’s work is in the collections of Ashiya City Museum of Art and History and the Miyagi Museum of Art, among others.